7.4b1 performance

I just wanted to let the developers know, i'm VERY IMPRESSED with the
7.4b1 release.  I've been using it exclusively on my two development
machines since it was released without any problems at all.   I was
also using cvs on and off for a while before the beta.

my development machines are an athlon 1800 with 1gb memory, 3 drive ide
sw/raid5 running redhat9 and an  800mhz ibook with 640mb memory, 30gb
ide drive running osx 10.2.6 with fink

I've also noticed significant performance improvements.  I have
simulated a typical 30 minute period of our website by replaying 13,000
requests from our web access logs using 40 concurrent clients fetching
the pages .  The test mostly simulated read performance.  Since most of
our sites traffic is data distribution, it's the more important part
for us.  Postgres 7.3 took 73 minutes to generate the 13,000 pages and
Postgres 7.4 took 45 minutes to generate the same 13,000 requests.
The databases and codebase were identical for the tests.   The
configuration parameters in postgres.conf were for all practical
purposes identical.

Our database takes up several gigabytes on disk and we process in the
range of 1,000,000 dynamic web pages a day, each page doing on average
between 10 and 30 queries per page to display.

The graph below shows the most active pages and the average amount of
real time in seconds (not system or cpu time) they take to create.  So
part of the time is obviously spent waiting on other processes and in
our application code.